The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 24 | Number 3 | Article ID 3171 | Jun 15, 2009

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Laos Plain of Jars in the Wake of American Bombing

Russell Ciochon

Laos Plain of Jars in the Wake of AmericanBombing

Geoffrey Gunn, Russell Ciochon and JamieJames

A Lao soldier peers into a mammoth jar atBan Ang, the principal jar site. Jeffrey

Aaronson

At Lat Sen, sandstone jars are arrayed onthe top of a steep hill. Network Aspen

Introduction

Caught up in the vortex of the American war inVietnam, Laos (known as the Lao People'sDemocratic Republic since 1975) is reputed tobe the most heavily bombed country, percapita, in the world. U.S. Department ofDefense records reveal that 520,000 bomb runswere made over Laos, dropping more than 2million tons of ordnance. Major targets werethe Plain of Jars area in northern XiengKhouang province and the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”coursing through the southern panhandle withroutes connecting North to South Vietnam. These were not uninhabited zones but theancestral homeland of many ethic minorities.Compared with U.S. bombing in Vietnam andCambodia, what were the effects on Laos? And, decades after the end of the war, how dothe peoples of Laos live with the consequencesof the bombing?

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Map of Laos showing Xieng Khouangprovince

After long years of self-imposed isolation, Laoshas opened its doors to tourists – mostlybackpackers and the odd anthropologist –attracted by its landscapes, its cultures, andeven its megalithic sites, as contributingsignificantly to income and employment. ThePlain of Jars on the Xieng Khouang Plateau is amajor cultural heritage site, now recognized byUNESCO. According to UNESCO, unexplodedmilitary ordinance (UXO) still contaminates 25percent of the area of Xieng Khouangprovince, producing a “constant threat” to thepersonal safety of its 200,000 people. Needlessto say, the presence of UXO crimps economicdevelopment of the province. UNESCO is notonly concerned with UXO infestation, but withthe safeguarding of the priceless megalithicstone jar heritage, as described and illustratedhere by Russell Ciochon and Jamie James.Commencing in 1998, with the cooperation ofthe LPDR, UNESCO launched a multi-year planto map the Plain of Jars, currently entering thefinal phase (2006-2010) of UXO clearance,“pro-poor tourism” and “sustainable resources

management.”

Bombing in the Plain of Jars

Obviously, the clearance of UXO is not a taskfor an international cultural organization butinvolves time, money, and considerable risk.Pioneers in this venture in Laos were theAmerican Mennonites, one of the fewinternational NGOS trusted by the LPDR, whobegan a shoestring program back in the late1970s. Since then, a number of foreignmissions in Laos, joined by the UNDP, havemounted dedicated programs of UXOeradication. At LPDR invitation, U.S. SpecialOperation Forces also arrived in 1996 toinitiate a “training the trainer” program. Evenso, there have been up to 20,000 UXO-inflictedcasualties since the end of the war, with manymore wounded and maimed. As one concernedWestern Embassy official told this writer inVientiane in 2007, it would take possibly“several hundred years” to remove the UXO atthe present pace of activities.

Geoffrey Gunn

On a windy plateau in northern Laos, hundredsof three- to ten-foot-tall stone urns, someweighing as much as seven tons, lie scatteredacross a grassy plain. The local inhabitants say

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that the jars were made to celebrate a greatmilitary victory 1,500 years ago. The plain, sothe story goes, was ruled by an evil king,named Chao Angka, who oppressed his peopleso terribly that they appealed to a good king tothe north, named Khun Jeuam, to liberate them.Khun Jeuam and his army came, and afterwaging a great battle on the plain, defeatedChao Angka. Elated, Khun Jeuam ordered theconstruction of large jars to be used in makingwine for a victory celebration.

The jars are at least as old as the legendclaims, but if any were used for making wine,that was not their original function. In the1930s, French archeologist Madeline Colanidocumented the jars in a 600-page monograph,The Megaliths of Upper Laos, concluding thatthey were funerary urns carved by a vanishedBronze Age people. The jars neverthelessremain enigmatic, because after Colani’s time,Laos fell into an almost continual state ofwar—fought over successively by the French,the Japanese, and the Americans. With peacerestored, and the subsequent period of isolationended, we visited the Plain of Jars last winter tolearn about them and see how they had faredduring the decades of fighting.

Unless you have an ox cart, about the only wayto get to Xieng Khouang Province, where theplain is located, is to fly. As we took off in asmall Chinese prop plane from Vientiane, thecapital of Laos, we saw the small city laid outbelow us along the flat floodplain of themeandering Mekong River. The airplaneleveled off at a cruising altitude of about10,000 feet, but during the one-and-one-half-hour flight, the mountainous ground grewsteadily closer. The final mountain ridge washeavily forested on its near, western side,and—in a c l a ss i c example o f a ra inshadow—very arid and bare on its eastern side.

As we approached the airstrip at Phomsavan,the provincial capital, we saw thousands ofbomb craters pockmarking the barren plain, agrim memento of the American presence inSoutheast Asia. American forces dropped morethan 2 million tons of bombs on Laos during thewar in Indochina. Phomsavan has been builtover the past twenty years to replace the

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former provincial capital (Xieng Khouang),which was destroyed during the war. This dustylittle town became our base of operations.

The craters that dot the landscape in XiengKhouang Province are a legacy of intense

bombing in the 1960s and 1970s.

Other vestiges of war are the casings fromcluster bombs, now used both as fencing,above, and house stilts, below.

American forces dropped more than 2million tons of bombs on Laos during the

war in Indochina.

A l itt le more than a mile northeast ofPhomsavan lies the principal jar site, called BanAng by Colani: sixty acres of wind-swept prairiecontaining more than 250 urns. A huge crateron the perimeter of Ban Ang showed that abomb had narrowly missed hitting some of theurns, but otherwise we found the jars just asColani described them: "They are disposedwithout regularity, some of them pressing oneagainst another, others quite isolated. Each oneis fashioned from a separate block of stone, anda small number of them are very well executed,as though turned on a lathe, bespeaking thehand of a true artist." Fifty urns, including thelargest ones known to exist, are on a ridge onthe northeast edge of the site. Colani suggestedthat they might have held the remains of

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chieftains.

A few stone lids are scattered among the jars,some incised with a design of concentric rings.All the jars may have been fitted with lids, mostof which were later pilfered. Another theory,however, is that these stone lids served someother function, and that the urns originally hadwooden covers. In any case, all the jars appearto have been open to the elements forcenturies.

According to Henri Parmentier, a Frencharcheologist who made a brief visit to the Plainof Jars in 1923, the urns were brought to theattention of the Western world in 1909 by aFrench customs official named Vinet.Parmentier wrote that local villagers hadplundered the site in the intervening years:"Adults look at for carnelian beads, which theyare able to sell, and children find other baublesthey can play with." He added that many of thejars had been broken by such "untimelyexcavations."

Parmentier identified three types of jars at BanAng: squat-shaped ones, slender ones, andothers that were "almost sections of squared orrectangular prisms, with well-roundedcorners." And he was able to form an idea ofwhat a typical jar contained before it wasdisturbed: one or two black pots, one or twohand axes, "a bizarre object which we call alamp," often a spindle weight of iron, glassbeads, drilled carnelian beads, earrings ofstone or glass, bronze bells, and frequently thedebris of human bones.

In a shop in Phomsavan, right, recycledshells are offered for sale as containers.

Nik Wheeler

Then came Madeleine Colani, a pioneeringfieldworker who combined the roles ofgeologist, paleobotanist, archeologist, andethnographer. Born in 1866 in Strasbourg,Colani, the daughter of a Protestant biblicalscholar, decided at the age of thirty-three tomove to French Indochina, where she secured apost as a natural history teacher with thegeological service. She earned her doctorate inHanoi, at the age of fifty-four, with a thesisabout fossi l Fusul inidae, a family ofmicroscopic marine organisms.

A few years later, Colani began collaboratingwith Henry Mansuy, whose discoveries ofpolished stone tools and pottery in northernVietnam (known at the time as Tonkin) pushedthe archeological record in Indochina back toabout 5,000 years ago. In 1923, working withVietnamese guides, Colani discovered anenormous cache of prehistoric human remainsand stone tools in a cave in Tonkin. She loadedup four dozen baskets with bones and artifactsand transported them back to Hanoi. When shearrived, Mansuy at first accused her of havingraided as modern graveyard. Three years laterwhile excavating twelve cave sites in Hoa binhProvince, she made the first discovery of ahunting-foraging culture that we now knowdates as far back as 18,000 years ago. Shecalled this ancient stone-tool industry theHoab inh ian , the name s t i l l used by

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archeologists today.

A jar, carved out of granite, rests beside ajungle path some distance from the village

of Ban Hin. Nik Wheeler

Colani was accompanied in all her fieldwork byher sister, Eleonore. With their porters andguides, the two intrepid women traveled allover French Indochina, almost until theirdeaths, a few months apart, in 1943. The gossipamong French archeologists is that MadeleineColani made Eleonore do all the hard work, onoccasion lowering her into a cavern on a ropeand not letting her come back up until shefound something. The human remains andartifacts the Colani sisters amassed were alandmark contribution to the study ofprehistory in the region.

By 1931, when Madeleine Colani beganexploring at Ban Ang, much of the jar’scontents had already been looted. But byexcavating around the jars, she uncovered a

great quantity of objects, including bronze andiron tools, which she believed were used tocarve the jars. In addition to beads made ofglass and carnelian, she also found some shedescribed as "having the appearance of bakedearth," painted with bold geometric designs.Other artifacts included cowrie shells andbronze bracelets and bells. Colani interpretedthese artifacts, as well as those found byParmentier, as burial offerings, theorizing thatthe urns had contained cremated remains.

Adjacent to ban Ang is a limestone hill with alarge cave. Colani excavated there and foundevidence to bolster her contention that thehuman remains placed in the urns had beencremated. The cave mouth is at the level of theplain, and the chamber extends straight up totwo natural chimneys, which were formed bythe water that eroded the cave. Colaniobserved that the northeast wall was heavilyblackened from smoke, and in her excavation ofthe cave she found what she believed werecinerary vases in which the corpses wereburned.

While Ban Ang is the most widely known jarsite in Laos, similar stone urns are found

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throughout Xieng Khouang Province. Anotherimportant site, which Colani named Champd’Aviation de Lat Sen, after a French-builtairstrip that existed there at the time, lies justsix miles south of Ban Ang. The road there is sopoor that it took us nearly an hour to cover thedistance by car. At Lat Sen we observed abouteighty jars, some of which had been brokenapart by fig trees growing alongside or withinthem. Others were filled with stagnant water inwhich ferns and algae were growing.

Pioneering archeologist Madeleine Colanispeculated that the Plain of Jars lay on acaravan route stretching from the Vietnamesecoast, near Da Nang, to the North Cachar Hillsof India.

The Lat Sen jars were situated on the tops oftwo steep hills, which were separated by anarrow gully just wide enough to accommodatethe road. At the foot of one of the hills, we meta woman gathering firewood with her youngchildren. As did other people we encountered,she gave us the popular explanation for thejars: the tale of military victory and celebratorywine. She also said that the jars were moldedfrom a mixture of sand, sugar, and buffalohide—a traditional view disproved bymineralogical analysis. Luis Gonzalez, asedimentary geochemist at the University ofIowa, has examined a thin section of a Lat Sensample under a microscope. He describes thematerial as a natural sandstone consistingmainly of grains of quartz, potassium feldspar,and muscovite mica, cemented by a clay matrix.

A woman gathering firewood with heryoung children gave us the popularexplanation for the jars: they wereconstructed for use in making winefollowing a great military victory.

A third, more distant site we visited, whichColani called Ban Soua, lay in the middle of ricefields, at the foot of wooded hills. Several largebomb craters bordered the site, and afterconsulting Colani’s map, we concluded that afew of its 155 jars must have been destroyed bythe explosions. Judging from the sites wevisited, however, most of the jars cataloged byColani, survived the war, suggesting that theywere spared whenever possible.

Wanting to see some of the jars further off thebeaten track, we pored over Colani’smonograph at our guest house in Phomsavan,taking advantage of the two hours of electricallight provided before the generators switchedoff at nine o’clock. We settled on the village ofNa Nong, where Colani had found thirty-fourjars. The next morning we set off on whatproved to be the roughest road yet. When westopped an old woman to get directions, sheexplained that the village had been entirelydestroyed by American bombs during thewar—along with every vestige of the jars.

We drove on through the plain to the edge ofthe jungle and stopped at a little village calledBan Hin. It was a bustling place, filled withchildren playing games, and strutting turkeys

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fanning their tails. There, a man told us that heknew a place, about a two-hour walk into thejungle, where there were some large jarsdifferent from the ones at Ban Ang. Ourcuriosity aroused, we immediately asked him tolead us there.

The path from Ban Hin was well-worn, and wesaw many people on it as we climbed throughsteep, rocky ravines. The shady canopy oftowering teak trees was filled with colorfulbirds that flapped and shrieked high overhead.At the top of a heavily wooded ridge a group ofgirls were carrying huge bundles of firewoodon their backs. They had also gathered asackful of grubs for their lunch. Farther along,a hunter appeared with a brace of birds shotwith a rifle he had made. These chanceencounters brought home to us the importanceof hunting and gathering for the people of Laos.

The inhabitants of Xieng Khouang Provincerepresent a number of Laos’s ethnic groups,including the dominant Lao and such hill tribesas the Thai Dam, Hmong , and Yao. Like theoverwhelming majority of the country’s 4.3million inhabitants, they rely upon subsistencefarming for their livelihood. In contrast to otherSoutheast Asian nations, Laos is sparselypopulated, with a density comparable to thestate of Maine.

We stopped for a rest next to a fruit-bearingbush our guide called a mak kok. Its small,green fruit tasted bitterly astringent at first,but with a swallow of water from the canteen,the taste became refreshingly sweet.

The forest was filled with defused Americanbombs, some still sticking nose down in theearth. Among them was the device favored byU.S. forces in Laos: the "daisy cutter," a clusterbomb with a long casing designed to scattertennis-ball-size bomblets over a 3,000 square-yard area. The bomblets (which either explodedon impact or remained on the ground likemines) were not usually big enough to kill aman, but quite adequate for maiming adults

and killing children. The woods around thePlain of Jars are still full of these hideousdevices, which the people of Laos call bombis.As many as ten people die every month fromstepping on them. But the inhabitants of XiengKhouang put the bomb casings to good use.Most of the houses in the vicinity of Ban Hinare built on top of bomb-casing stilts, andfences made from the casings enclose manypigsties.

We finally reached the site where the jars werelocated, clustered around a small clearing nextto a mossy ravine. Our guide was right: unlikethe sandstone jars, these were carved from ahard, dark red granite. At the site were twointact urns, one very well crafted and anotherthat had fallen into the ravine. We alsoexamined several broken jars off the path, butwe didn’t stray too far into the jungle, lest weadd to the bombi statistics.

Colani’s monograph does not seem to includethis site, although it does identify two sitesnear what we think was the same village,whose name she transcribed as "Ban Him."Colani described the jars at these two sites asbeing made of sandstone, a point about whichshe was not likely to have been mistaken,especially since she did encounter some granitejars at other locations. We may have been thefirst trained observers to record theseparticular jars. That would not be so surprising,for there has been very little fieldwork in Laossince Colani’s time.

A two-week excavation carried out by Japanesearcheologist Eiji Nitta is a recent exception. In1994, Nitta dug four test trenches around oneof the stone jars at Ban Ang, exposing a carvingof a human figure on the side of the jar, thefirst anthropomorphic image recorded at thesite. Nearby he also discovered, eight to twelveinches below the soil surface, seven flat stones,each covering a pit. Six of the pits containedhuman bones and the seventh contained a two-foot-tall burial jar with small pieces of bone and

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teeth inside. The jar’s brown lacquer surfacewas incised with decorative designs. None ofthe human remains Nitta discovered had beenburned, and he found no charcoal in thetrenches.

In his correspondence with us, Nitta states thatthe seven pits were secondary burials, apractice in which the bones of the deceased aredug up and ritually reburied. He concludes thatthe entire Plain of Jars was a cemetery ofsecondary burials. He also contends that theburial pits are as old as the jars or even older,while the jars themselves may not be as old asColani suggested. Still, it may be premature toquestion Colani’s interpretations. After all, shedid find charcoal and burned bones in herexcavations. Perhaps people placed stone urnswith cremated remains in hallowed ground theyknew had previously been used for secondaryburials.

Then who created the Plain of Jars? Colani, whowas more willing to speculate than mostmodern archeologists, suggested that the sitesin Laos were part of a far-ranging Bronze Ageculture. She pointed out that some stone jarsdiscovered in the North Cachar Hills ofnortheastern India, more than 600 miles to thenorthwest, had roughly the same design anddimensions as the urns in Laos. J.P. Mills andJ.H. Hutton, the English scholars whodiscovered the Indian urns in 1928, foundfragments of human bones in them, which theyconcluded were human remains. They notedthat cremation was still being practiced bysome of the Kuki, a people who had lived in theNorth Cachar Hills for centuries.

The main road near Phomsavan, on thePlain of Jars. Most Lao are subsistence

farmers. Nik Wheeler

Some stone jars discovered in northeasternIndia, more than 600 miles away, resemble theurns in Laos.

Colani also called attention to Sa Huynh, a sitesouth of the city of Da Nang, Vietnam. There,urns of baked earth containing some humanremains were found buried in the sand dunesalong the shores of the South China Sea.Although these remains had not beencremated, the objects interred withthem—including ceramic vases, small bronzebells, and beads—resembled those discoveredon the Plain of Jars.

"If our interpretation is correct," Colaniproposed, "we are in the presence of three linksfrom the same chain: the ancient monoliths ofCachar, the stone jars of Tran Ninh [XiengKhouang], and the necropolis of Sa Huynh."According to Colani, prehistoric salt tradershad followed a caravan route from Sa huynh toLuang Prabang, located near the northwestedge of the Plain of Jars. Perhaps, sheconcluded, that route once extended all theway to the North Cachar Hills, and the peoplewho lived along it shared a similar culture,burying their dead (cremated or not, dependingupon local custom) in megalithic jars. Colani

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even drew a map with a line connecting thethree sites, and suggested that explorersventuring along this line would find yet morejar sites.

Mos t s cho l a r s , i nc lud ing ThongsaSayavongkhamdy, the Laotian government’sdirector general of the Department of Museumsand Archeology and the country’s only trainedarcheologist, assign a tentative age of 2,000years to the stone urns of Xieng Khouang, withoutside dates of 500 B.C. to A.D. 300. By thelatter date, complex societies based on Indianmodels were already prospering in the coastalregions and along the major rivers ofpeninsular Southeast Asia. The rise of the greatkingdoms of Angkor (in Cambodia), Champa (inVietnam), and Pagan (in Myanmar), whichreached their zenith by A.D. 1000, long

prevented Laos from becoming an independentpower. The f irst kingdom of Laos wasestablished in 1353, with its capital in theuplands at Luang Prabang. By then, the stonejars scattered over the nearby plain belongedto a forgotten past.

This article was originally published in NaturalHistory, September 1995.

Russell L. Ciochon is Professor and Chair,Department of Anthropology, University ofIowa. His website is here.

Recommended Citation: Russell L. Ciochon,“Laos Plain of Jars in the Wake of AmericanBombing” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol.24-3-09, June 15, 2009.